I’m on my way to Peru (hooray for vacations!). In preparation for the hike on the Inca Trail to Macchu Picchu I needed to get a new sleeping bag. My old one, a Coleman bag circa 1892 or so, was lost to the Appalachian Trail (AT) last fall. Which was fine, since it was heavy. Really heavy. And not super warm, either, which I discovered when the AT turned into a winter wonderland. 60° and sunny? Nope!
Picking a new sleeping bag is sort of daunting. You’ve got a number of different materials, shapes, and sizes to choose from. What impressed me, though, is recent efforts to simplify temperature ratings for consumers. The new EN 13537 standard actually takes into account the differences between men and women, and then expresses it in an easy to read label:
This is exactly the way a label should be: clear, consise, and informative, telling you exactly what you need to know. If you know your gender and what temperature you want to sleep in you can instantly eliminate temperature from the choices you need to make (down vs. synthetic, regular vs. long, etc.).
As an IT guy that works very hard to simplify things for himself, coworkers, and customers it’s nice to see other industries doing the same. As a result I’m much more confident that the sleeping bag I spent $250 on is going to do exactly what I need it to, when I need it to. Which is always my goal when I’m simplifying IT processes, too.
Some friends of mine and I have been following Alice Peacock for years. I’m not quite sure anymore how we got started listening to her, but she’s great. You may have heard her songs on the radio, or on a Hershey’s chocolate commercial. I saw her in Madison, WI last Friday. I didn’t have her newest CD so I bought one. Being me, I decided I didn’t want her to sign it in the same way every artist signs a CD, and so:
Nice!
It’s cool what happens when you ask people to do something a little bit differently.
Q: What’s the easiest way to get rid of malware on Windows[0]?
A: Not to get it in the first place.
A couple of other observations I made while cleaning a friend’s computer:
1. The malware was detected by my friend because it was closing windows. Any window that could be used to fix the infection was closed by the malware. That doesn’t seem to be a very productive strategy for staying installed.
2. The Avast BARTPE CD creator rocks. Luckily, a part of my organization that does more desktop support for customers has a license for it. It’s really nice to boot off a CD to fix everything.
3. I started with the Avira free antivirus scanner. It is worth what you pay for it. I couldn’t get it to switch to the right screen resolution so I could see the buttons to trigger a scan, the English edition is in German, and there are no command-line utilities that work (or documentation to indicate what I should be doing). In the immortal words of Maddox: Terrible. F.
4. I really like how malware authors are taking out ads for antivirus products on Google. Search for “avast” or “avira” and the sponsored links at the top of the results are not reputable sources…
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[0] Pre-emptive snarky comment: “Windows sux!” or “Linux wouldn’t have this problem” or “Apple r00lz!” — yes, we know, in a perfect world you’d be the benevolent emperor and would require everyone to use some other far-superior OS.[1]
Hey, what’s this? It’s a blog… and I seem to have a login to it. :-)
Some of you have emailed me, wondering where in the heck I’ve gone. It’s not a long story:
1. Work has been nutty lately. I can safely summarize it by saying “be careful what you wish for.” For a long time I’ve wanted to get more involved with project management and higher-level decision making in my organization. Now I long for the days when it was just me, vi, and a dark room.
2. My hobbies have been nutty lately. I decided about a year ago that I’d like to try producing a play with my theater company, Strollers Theatre. I’ve done that now. There’s really no way to describe how difficult it is to start from nothing and build a show that people will want to attend. I can say that it’s a lot easier when you get the right people on your team. Someone who is on top of their game makes everything more enjoyable. It’s finding those people that’s tough (and then not burning them out).
On top of it all, where I’ve had some personal time it’s been consumed with weddings, funerals, births, emergencies, illnesses, my desire to sleep, and occasionally some escape back into World of Warcraft (yeah, I started playing again — a guy needs at least one fun hobby). :-) At any rate, this week is different. I’m getting back on the horse here, catching up on my blog reading, and going to start writing again. Yeehah!
Has anybody ever had a server get too cold? I’ve seen them get too warm, but there’s very little data about the cold end of things. Can anybody tell me what happens?
I’m mainly talking about servers. We do have some IBM tape drives that don’t like the cold, but that’s understandable. In the cold I’d expect issues with fans, especially the cheap ones with sleeve bearings. What else?
In the last few days, since April 1, my RSS feed subscriber count on FeedBurner has plummeted, now just a little over a third of what it has been for a long time. It looks like lots of people are having this problem, as well as email subscribers not getting any email.
Perhaps Google should apply the “beta” designation to FeedBurner, too. I’ve figured that this was some sort of reporting problem, because a 60% change in readership numbers is a huge error, and catastrophic for people who have ad deals, apply for funding and grants based on statistics, etc. In typical Google style there’s just one little mention of this on their blog:
Issue: We are observing reduced subscriber totals reported by Google Feedfetcher for many feeds. This number represents subscribers you may have via Google Reader and iGoogle. These lower totals have occurred over the past two days. We’re working closely with the Feedfetcher team to determine when a resolution might be possible.
Workaround: None. Please bear in mind feeds are available as usual and subscribers (feed and email) are receiving any updates you may be posting. This is a reporting issue only.
It’d be nice if they fixed the problem, and doubly nice if they’d let people know what was going on, with a banner or something on the site itself. Google is terrible with anything approaching soft skills, like customer support, UIs, or even telling people they know that there is a problem and to chill out. If they want to continue making money off of people using their services they need to be more forthcoming about stuff like this. Maybe hire someone who played with stuffed animals more than Legos.
This also means we need a competitor to FeedBurner. Badly. At this point I’d put my blog in both.
I have to stay current on my blog reading… I missed the “Eric Whitacre Extravaganza” a few weeks ago in Minneapolis. It would have been really cool to hear the new Nox Aurumque performed by St. Olaf, and one of those events my mom and brother would have wanted to see, too. I credit my ex-girlfriend Susannah for introducing me to Whitacre’s work, in that she was part of a group that sang Water Night, Cloudburst, and Lux Aurumque two summers ago. BYU renditions have since been permanent fixtures on my iPhone.
I just spent the last 30 minutes replaying the Conspirare version of What If, over and over and over. I agree with Mr. Whitacre’s description as “a very cool arrangement,” as the percussion is really neat. This is why allowing derivative works of your own work is a great idea. I wasn’t that into the original piece from Paradise Lost, but this arrangement really does something for me. I also like that the singers appear to be having fun.
I need to find the DVD of this concert ASAP, and put them on the list of things to see next time I’m in Austin.
